CBS 5 Computer Repair Scam Investigations Geek Squad pc repair scam

they CHARGE to clean up viruses!? Let alone looking at geek squads website they offer to "Speed up" your computer for a 120 dollar home visit... looking at what they do it is literally nothing special at all that you can't do yourself in an hour or so with FREE programs online!

GeekSquad is not a family owned computer repair business. They are an affiliate created by a larger company. 

My grandmother didn't know that the pop up to update Adobe Flash was normal so she called Geeksquad to get help and instead of the person telling my grandma how to install it they made her pay $50 upfront and go through a whole rigmarole... trying to make more money off of her. That was until I fixed it myself in 2 minutes 

Geek Squad is a waste of money. Don't ever get the extended warranty from Best Buy. You're better off getting serviced by a local computer repair company. It's cheaper, and they usually won't BS you.

General rule of thumb, if you can see your Hard drive in the bios,  then its not dead... worse case senario you will have to format and reinstall the O/S always take it w/ a grain of salt if a component is "dead"   computer hardware is pretty tough now

I did this with the geek squad nearby my area. but I disconnected the CPU 4 Pin power connector and they told me I had a toasted board, CPU is fried and my HDD is dead too. 

I had my Yahoo Store close me out by saying my password wasn't valid, then it had a warning notice with a toll free number. I spent $250 for them to clean my computer I could then log in and publish changes on my website store. After making another change on my website store and trying to publish it on Yahoo Site a Builder I am getting error again that my password is incorrect when it is correct!
Are there any other small business owners out there that are getting scammed like I did?

wow unbelievable 

this is good to know fuck best buy and the geek squad. thanks for posting this. I will share this video.

why isn't Best Buy in the news to make more people aware.

what awful puns at the beginning LOL 

This is one of the reasons why I learned how to build my own pc. I have been doing so for over 15 years now. There's nothing in the computer I can't fix or replace and it's a great feeling that I am able to fix this myself.

to be fair, those arent exactly the kind of things you usually look for, those cables dont just come loose or fall out in a normally used desktop pc. they often times even have clips on them to make them extra secure. furthermore, diagnosing a pc problem (in general) is usually a pretty complex process and easily the most time consuming part of pc repair, so the diagnostic fee is totally fair (even if all they had to do was plug in that cable). 99% of the time if a drive disappears its a software issue or the drive is dead. those cables just dont come out by themselves (at least not with that kind). on the other hand, if you get as far as opening up the computer a quick cable check should have taken no time at all, and im surprised they never attempted to take the drive out at any point to test it separately, at which time it would've surely been discovered. so im not defending them on that note. also i was told by someone at best buy that if youre A+ Certified, youre already overqualified to work on the geek squad, so i wouldnt recommend using them anyway. still, I think the "problem" they created for them to repair was kinda stupid. that poor kid working at best buy had likely never encountered that before and probably never will again. also, the "doctors" had fraud written all over them the moment i saw them in the video.

Data recovery does cost. If the data important it will cost a lot for repair, They have no choice but to pay Because of sensitive information. I will attempt to a recovery through my knowledge, Beyond that without damaging the drive any further. Usually i send them off to a Clean room. Mostly I will tell them how much they usually charge.

I work in Geek Squad currently. I can infer why this happened most likely. We get a large volume of computers with broad issues. Our techs, (Advanced Repair Agents, as they are called), do very little to the computers themselves. They simply plug in a USB flash drive that contains proprietary Geek Squad software that runs a huge test that tests and checks the hardware, O.S., and then runs virus scanners. Im sure the test found that the drive was missing and the stupid techs thought "hurr durr must be bad" and just gave up. happens at my store all the time, and it pisses me off royally. They won't even open up the computer. They also deem the harddrive bad if it fails any sort of the hard drive diagnostics, including any SMART test warnings. It's a rip off. I know I've never seen them check a cable to see if it's plugged in. i would guess that 60-70% of hard drives that they tell people are bad are actually still functional, but may be old or wearing out, and they will insist that they can do no more work on it unless the hard drive is changed. What a joke. As for whether there are viruses on the computer, I see many many many computers that have "viruses" on them, which once again, can be any slight trace of adware that one of our antiviruses found. We do use genuine antiviruses that are mainstream, like malewarebytes and Kaspersky though. So not sure if people are being ripped off or if honestly the AV's are too sensitive. personally, I do not recommend taking your computer to Geek Squad, and no I don't care that it's hurting my own business, I hope someone from corporate reads this. Our business is shady and costly, and the staff are under trained. Our ARA's only care about getting computers in and out, not about fixing a fixable problem. We overcharge people hilariously for simple fixes. and please for the love of god, if you're still reading this, DO NOT send anything to the Geek Squad service center, AKA Geek Squad City. The work done there is even shadier than in store.

Sooo I have this Acer desktop and a Cyberpower PC.  It had a few viruses so I went to check out with the geek squad,  They charged a shit load.  I'm talkin' 100+ dollars.  After the check up my computer seemed to be even worse.  It had advertisements that would pop up.  Shit just didn't work. gg gs gg

call me xD

I bet the last business that found what was really wrong and gave them a 10% discount on the service call got a more business form this.

My computer, my rules.
Anyone except myself, touch my computer.
ANYONE

Sound that company is ran by republicans.

Not every virus can be found. They might have missed it or found another one.

This is why I fix my own computers.

This is why I need to open my own pc repair shop. Pc's are very simple to work on. And these big companies need to get knocked down. It truly is sad to see people getting scammed like this. Shame on geek squad a back up and format is so simple it's scary and to tell her they can't back it up and she will lose everything. When there wasn't even a problem with the OS anyways. Even removing viruses if there really was any is also and easy fix and charging them more then it would cost to buy a whole new pc that would be even better then that one. PItiful!

"For best fastest"....no thanks, if I need computer repair, which i never will since I work in datacenter operations, I'd go to a company that had better understanding of the english language.

I worked at Best Buy and was a customer service specialist, I only had glimpses of what geeksquad did but the guys at our store were pretty good. They all had custom rigs and knew quite a bit about what they did. I honestly think it depends on the store and managers who are working. One day a lady wanted to do a data transfer so I took her back into the computing department and transferred all her files to a drive she wanted it on. Customer satisfaction is more important than making money.

Ayy, when I bought a PC in a store in my country which is a big company, they asked me if I wanted extra warranties, I agreed. We had to pay an extra $99. 2 years later, I knew all about pc and stuff, the warranty was running out, so I just "broke" the motherboard and the damages could be fixed easily, they told me that they needed to do a OS reinstallation, they reinstalled, charged an extra 80 bucks and when I took it back home, it functioned for 2 hours before shit happens, and I just exposed the company on a forum and now their business is quite bad

wow... trying to scam people over a loose cable... you gotta be a friggin jerk

the puns... so much cringe

This is why I perform my own maintenece.

I fix my own computer. never had to take it to a computer shop. Despite how complicated it was. Pays to be a Comptia+ and Cisco Certified computer user :D

i fix mine easy lol

Your ad being placed over a video you didn't produce is fucking gross.

fry's electronics in tempe az passes the test every time. Love them madly

GET EXPOSED BEST BUY!!!!!

My comment is about pricing and assuming the company is honest and found the simple problem being the plug needed to be reconnected.

I️ don’t own a computer business but I️ do own car business. If I️ did own a computer business I️ would charge a fee to drive to someone’s house and a diagnostic fee. You are not ripping any one off you are doing exactly what the customer needed done. If the customer bought the computer from me than I️ would for sure help them out on the price. You can’t expect a business to pay an employee to drive to you bout to fix your computer for free

Also if the computer needed a part your obviously going to pay the repair company more for the part than you can get it for online. That goes with pretty much any business. That’s how the world works.

Here is the thing. I watch these things and the problem is that with these "mass geek" companies, the most qualified people DON"T work for them. If you want GREAT computer repair? Find a small computer repair shop ran and owned by one or two guys, these guys will usually fix your problem and not charge you an arm and a leg. Most of the guys in places like Geek Squad and such are paid hourly, so it is not in their best interest to do a good job, most aren't even qualified. I am an IT supervisor that does stuff like this all the time in a company. It is always in my best interest to do a good job because I am the only IT guy. If I went to work in one of these companies I would be overly qualified, problem is, I would never work for them because they couldn't afford me. People that have worked more than 3 years in IT aren't going to settle for 35k a year in places like this. That is why local business owners would because all the profits go them them. In college we were tested like this. We all took computers and built them out of a scrap pile, then afterwards one of the more tech sound students would do one thing to each computer...... except mine, because I was one of the other advanced students, so he did 4 things to mine. We had to figure out what was wrong. Could have been everything from an unseated ram stick to a renamed "corrupted" system file on the hard drive.

Buy Mac.

Maybe this why Microsoft just says refresh the windows 10 so it can run properly and faster.

This is why I google the problem first.

ha ha stethoscopes

Running a repair shop is not something you can do "on the cheap"' You need rent, tools, equipment, insurance, employees, taxes, parts, advertising, phones, service vehicles, and on and on. The shop probably needs to make a couple hundred on every box that comes through the door. That's why a minor repair can actually cost more than you would expect.
The real "Repair Scam" here is the organization that rigged a fake problem, lied to the shop keeper and took up his valuable time for the sole purpose of discrediting him. Shame on you CBS !

Goddamn this video may as well be titled "boomers epic fail at evolving with technology"

The guys dressed in lab coats with stethoscopes using medical lingo is too great. Fucking cringe you can only get from times long gone.

The wire that runs from my power button to the MB was popped. I went looking for what I thought would be an easy replacement but none of the places I visited didn't do any such repairs and of course they had no wire. If I had a small piece of wire with the female plug I could fix it myself. Any suggestions?

My stock psu died. I bought a new case and psu and just swapped my case and installed the new psu. I also replaced all the hard drives and installed a new ssd just for the Os. My computer is essentially brand new and I did it all by myself. These scam techs would charge me $500 for this minus the parts. .

computer: *has a loose wire
geek squad: this computer has been diagnosed with death now give us 500$

I called geaksquad to ask them a sempl question ankut my motherboard they said they only waybthey can help ne is if i give them access to my comp i said ok they emedioutly deleted all my info disabled all my drivers and that shut it off, than i got an email toeling me they fixed the issue i was having..... tha k god for back ups